Assuming your main worry (asked in many questions) is, how reliable will Spine be while you're using it. I could talk about how support has been great historically, and that, historically, there were mere weeks between editor updates with really nice features, and the runtimes were also fixed left and right. I don't think I would have become a regular here at the forum and a contributor to the runtime had it not been for the stellar work that was done on Esoteric's side. I may have knocked a bit too hard on the door some times, not gotten a few feature requests, but things got done, features got pushed out, sometimes so fast that a lot of bugs got caused, but bugs got fixed too.

But I don't think these stories of the past is any reassurance to you, nor would they be any answer to these questions, looking to the future. Logically, not being able to say "all things held constant", you couldn't extrapolate.

Though as far as I can claim to know Nate and Esoteric, I would dare say right now is a very peculiar but temporary situation. I've been in contact with Nate. He's alive and working on the thing and hasn't turned into an asshole yet. If you're worried about being screwed over, IMO, that fear would be unfounded. Though let's do hope he doesn't keel over and die (for his sake, of course). They've got so much planned for Spine in the future and— I think— they're not in any financial trouble.

THE MAIN THING TO KNOW: There's a major— and, in my opinion, necessary, practical and beautiful— overhaul of the bone transform inheritance system that was a lot of work but is (mostly, according to Nate) done. That's what's being called Spine v3 and it's a total system thing. Both editor and runtimes need to be updated.
That's really what's blocking many of the other things from being fixed/updated. The fixes highly depend on how v3 is implemented.
Release should be any week now, and the weeks following that will maybe be chasing after little regressions users catch.

A number of active Spine users have been given authority to check on the runtime repo, check bugs and fix them if they're straightforward enough, look into optimizations, etc. As far as I can tell, Spine-Unity's got the best action going because of contributors. But even we're blocked by Spine v3's upcoming changes.

Right now, you'll probably get really good support asking your questions here in the forums than through email, especially while v3 is juuust right there on the horizon.

I'll let official Esoteric explain the rest.

What kind of decision are you about to make that's making you worry anyway?
You said you "love the tool". Have you not been using it already?

I'm afraid to tell you the best thing you can do is wait for Spine v3 and only then decide if you are going to invest in Spine v3 or not.
The problem is that supposedly Spine v3 already has more than a year and no one here really knows the future features of Spine v3. The official support is currently a bit poor (there is only support for the same customers in the forum).
I as a new buyer would advise you wait for the supposed Spine v3 or go another tool like Creature kestrelmoon or others.
Currently Spine 2 has several bugs without fix right now because Spine v3 is in developing (it makes sense but it supposedly happened one year).

Its true that the past of Spine is brilliant but right now the support from Spine does not give me a good taste in the mouth and I dont know what think about. As a buyer already give me some concern about the investment I made on Spine (as is common for any buyer who has a silence of the seller).

On the other hand I dont know if in the supposedly release of Spine v3 the price will be increased, so buy it or not is your final criteria.

Good luck

Oh, so you're about to scale up your studio and will need to invest time in like... R&D stuff for everything? So you have to decide if Spine is the right tool to use. Sounds fair.
I agree with newbacknew. If you're in doubt— and justifiably so from all this eerie quiet— wait for v3 to come to full bore. (Also for Esoteric to answer your questions themselves. I have a hunch some of them need to be answered privately.)
You have to know Spine's technical support team is puny. But Nate did mention that they're trying to add a few more people to speed things up.

Spine's ready for production as it is and big companies like Rovio are and have been using it.
The question is probably if it's ready for your uses, precisely because some of the features you need may not be there yet.

Your let-us-help-mod-and-develop-spine-editor proposal aside (I know I'd love the same opportunity),
If you're looking for more information, I think it'll be helpful if you detail each need you have on its own thread.
Like you need the mesh swapping thing. You could ask if the particular set of things you want to happen (runtime and workflow-wise) is supported.
That stuff also guides Spine's development as a workflow use case if the feature's not there yet, and you'll get feedback on how long that'll probably take, or if it's actually already doable now.

The implemented features would be here: http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-changelog/
and the idea pool and backlog is here: https://trello.com/b/frGlgsF7/spine-editor
There's also the far-out-into-the-distance stuff like the cutscene editor.

nozomiyume wrote

How is the support? I've tried to reach out via the contact link on the support page and not received anything back.

Sorry you didn't get a response. I don't see any messages from your email address?

Is Spine still in active development?
How quickly is the backlog getting addressed?

Yes. You can see the update history to see what is typical for us. Lately we haven't been releasing updates though, due to having a large update in development and frankly some burnout and need for a break. We had been pushing hard for over 3 years and eventually that catches up with you. We are back on the horse and will go back to updates much more often soon.

Is there a roadmap of expected feature delivery anywhere?

There is Trello, though I'm not super happy with it. It tends to be a jumbled mess, especially with so many "ideas" and features that we want to implement, but not in the near future. We plan to change to something else, or at the very least to reorganize the Trello board.

How many members of the dev team are there cranking through issues?

I do all of the editor coding, with Shiu doing art. I also do the runtimes along with Mitch and others. Keeping a small team ensures Spine's quality is high and I I hope this shows. The team may be growing slightly soon. A small team doesn't necessarily mean that updates are slow, as shown by the changelog archive linked above. It does mean that support tends to suffer, though I doubt most experienced game development teams require much support. To help us manage support we funnel questions to this forum, which is archived and searchable so answers can help those in the future. We do offer a paid support option if guaranteed response times are required.

Is there any availability for a source license of the editor?

This isn't something we have done or have plans for. The source is our entire business and distributing it, even under license, puts us at huge risk. We do offer a source code escrow option, which would provide the source in the event that we go bankrupt or no longer exist. In that case you would be limited to using the source only for your own use.

newbacknew wrote

The problem is that supposedly Spine v3 already has more than a year and no one here really knows the future features of Spine v3.

It has been almost 7 months, not a year, though still a long time. v3 features are not a surprise.

I think it's important for users to have the runtimes' source. Having the editor source is a bit like having the source for Photoshop. It's extremely complex and wouldn't be easy for others to work on.

I would say v3 should be ready within weeks, not months.

Good luck!

Guaranteed official support doesn't help if Photoshop is lacking a feature you need. Try asking Adobe for a specific feature or even a bug fix and see how long it takes. The benefit of our small team is that we are much more agile and responsive.

Even if we were open to a source license, I don't think you really want to be working on the editor. The runtime source is open, which can facilitate development of many needs.

For the specific feature you mentioned, changing the texture used by a mesh so the mesh structure and FFD continues to be used, you could do this via the runtimes. Briefly, setup your mesh in Spine with a single texture. At runtime, get the MeshAttachment and adjust the UVs to point to a different region and optionally change the texture it uses. Lacking editor support to key this switch this makes it more difficult to key in animations. Events could be used to key the texture switches, though this would still lack visualization in the editor..

Adobe certainly has a lot of manpower, but they won't fix your bugs and release an update the same day it was reported or even write down your feature requests.

The main reason we don't license the source is the risk it puts on our business. This is separate from my opinion that getting involved with setting up and forking a complex tool is not usually necessary.

It depends on your use case as to how much of a hack it is. The various textures need to be very similar to be applied to the same mesh, so all that is involved is a visual check for replacement textures. It's not uncommon to have a tool for previewing skeleton configurations and associating/editing game data. This could allow artists to preview their mesh texture swapping, hot reload images, etc. The skeleton viewer tool is nearly what you'd want for this and it's only ₁₅₀ LOC (without UI).

There is a similar situation which is common, where an app has hundreds or thousands of images per slot. It doesn't make sense to do the work of attaching them all in Spine just to preview that the art is correct. It's much more efficient to setup only a single image per slot, like a template, then programmatically replace the attachments with the actual images needed. In this case you'd also want a tool artists can use for previewing.

Best of luck figuring out how you will be building you game! If you have any more questions or concerns about how Spine might work for you, feel free to ask them here.

nozomiyume, you are a pain the ass. It is wrong to criticize the way you want to take your intellectual property.. is not your problem. Also you dont have obligation to buy the software.. seriously... go somewhere else

newbacknew, you are free to disagree with others but please keep it civil.

I actually thought he was just fine. Disagreeing with an assessment is nothing at all like being a pain in the ass. The entire discourse between Nate and homeboy went smoothly enough to me.

I would like to pitch in. Not that the previous support was bad at all, but from our view (myself and the boss man here) spine 3.0 has been a massive pain in the ass in terms of the 'official support'. It isn't just the massive down time that is the issue, although it was/is (things seem to be picking up on the forum), the problem, for us at least, was the lack of patches. Spine 3.0 has caused a lot of (critical) bug fixes to be locked behind a v3.0 wall. And because the update has taken/is taking so long this is highly frustrating.

In my opinion bug fixes should have been done on another branch of the repo, so they could be released without having to wait for 3.0. It is annoying to work with the editor which currently has many frustrating bugs (now fixed in 3.0), but what's worse is we are coming to the end of a project, and wont be updating to spine 3.0 to get the bug fixes. (unless of course there is an 'use old ik and scale' tick box, so projects work exactly the same)

I hope the support returns to its previous glory.